Secretlab’s unicorn potential, explained

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Hello readers,

There may be many of you out there like me who have been working from home since the Covid-19 pandemic began. The setup certainly has its benefits: no tiresome commute to the office everyday, saving time and costs, among other things.

On the flip side, working from home can be a pain. A pain in the back, specifically.

A comfortable office chair didn’t mean much to me before, but once the lockdown was imposed, the need for lumbar support quickly became my top priority.

While I went out and bought my own comfortable office chair, it paled in comparison to the gaming chairs some of my colleagues went for. Maybe a bit heavier on the wallet, but they did look pretty comfy.

Gaming chairs definitely saw a lot of demand due to the rise in remote work. Take gaming chair firm Secretlab, for instance. The company’s operating profit I found out had jumped by nearly 4x to an estimated US$52 million in the financial year ending February 2021.

Besides that, I learned – through a source and our own analysis – that Secretlab is secretly a unicorn.

What’s even more interesting is that the startup has been one of the fastest at achieving profitability and has posted high revenue growth year on year. A peek into its financial results a year earlier (FYE 2020) – which was revealed for the first time on Singapore’s Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority – showed that the company had already been on the fast track to growth at the time.

So though the pandemic was a welcome boost for the company, it was already sitting comfortably even before that.

I may not be a serious gamer, but I’m now definitely thinking about picking up a gaming chair. If you are using one, let me know which one you would recommend.

– Collin Furtado, news editor at Tech in Asia

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